6 New Albums Pushing Doom Metal Forward

Welcome to Pitchfork’s monthly metal column, where we guide you through the genre’s new music and happenings with an eye towards a specific theme. Inspired by Bell Witch, this month we delve into the best recent doom metal releases.

Some of this year’s best albums have confronted death head on. With A Crow Looked at Me, Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum offered a diaristic account of grief, taking stock of how the loss of his wife affected everything that’d come to define him. “Death is real,” he sang in its opening lines, “It’s not for singing about/It’s not for making into art.” Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto created his sixteenth solo album, async, while battling throat cancer. Like A Crow Looked at Me, the mood is somber and reflective, but the ambient work feels more like a salve—soothing, even hopeful—seeking comfort over catharsis.

Bell Witch’s third album Mirror Reaper lands somewhere between the two. While experimenting with other styles (namely post-rock), the Seattle duo has always operated in the realm of doom metal, a subgenre where things move as slowly and as heavily as possible. Doom’s mournful vocals and thick, ominous atmospheres make death feel constant, each chord like a lumbering footstep towards the inevitable. While Bell Witch’s work has always embraced themes of death and loss, the melding of music and subject matter on Mirror Reaper is, to say the least, seamless. They’ve created an ambitious, interrogative work steeped in sorrow, speaking to something more universal than their own very real pain.

A single 83-minute track, Mirror Reaper was written after the death of founding member Adrian Guerra, whose vocals make an eerie appearance on the latter half of the album. Amid the ghastly drones of Dylan Desmond’s bass and the spectral glimmer of Jesse Shreibman’s organ, Guerra’s singing is a haunting manifestation of how the ones we lose stay with us, no matter how heavy their absence becomes. In a genre built on purposeful monotony, Mirror Reaper is a reminder of how much light can seep in through all that negative space.

It must also be said that doom metal is not always defined by its fascination with the morbid. Last week saw the tragic death of one of the subgenre’s youngest, brightest voices: Jon Rossi, aka the Wizard, leader of Rhode Island band Pilgrim. His music offered an escape, with wild quests and battle cries in nearly every track. Even when they tugged along like slow clouds on a gloomy day, there was something triumphant in each of his compositions. Rossi’s work illustrated that, like the music itself, doom metal moves in a slow, steady progression forward. Below, find five other artists who’ve reveled in that spirit this month.

Spectral Voice — Eroded Corridors of Unbeing

No metal debut arrived to more anticipation this year than Spectral Voice’s Eroded Corridors of Unbeing. Sharing three members with Denver’s Blood Incantation, Spectral Voice combine the earthy death metal of Disembowelment with droning, ghastly doom. After several excellent demos hinting at deeper ambitions, Eroded Corridors of Unbeing is a confident reintroduction: as mysterious as those shadowy early recordings, but sharpened to a point when it comes to the quartet’s interweaving styles. Its five tracks range in style from relentless blasts of riffs to sprawling epics, all suggesting a meticulous penchant for songcraft.

Primitive Man — Caustic

Primitive Man’s brand of doom metal feels like an unearthed fossil: ancient, heavy, and coated with dirt. Their grueling lo-fi atmosphere recalls black metal at its gnarliest, but Primitive Man’s music bears little of that genre’s eerie thrash. Instead, they trudge slowly and noisily with songs that aim to antagonize and provoke. “Commerce” is a 12-minute highlight that rails against capitalism, with vocalist Ethan Lee McCarthy howling lines like, “Overworked, underpaid/From a system meant to fail us.” It goes to show that doom metal doesn’t have to look beyond the grave to find inspiration—there’s enough misery right inside your cubicle.

Sorcerer — The Crowning of the Fire King

Black Sabbath’s discography is an endless well of inspiration for doom metal bands, and Sweden’s Sorcerer draw from one of its most obscure corners: Sabbath’s spacey, theatrical power metal phase, as fronted by Tony Martin in the late ’80s. Formed around that time, Sorcerer is a Swedish band that, up until 2012, only had two crudely recorded demos to its name. After they reunited in 2010, their music was rediscovered and remastered, which inspired them to finally release something new. The Crowning of the Fire King is Sorcerer’s second album since this rebirth, and their finest work to date. In power ballads like “Abandoned by the Gods,” Anders Engberg’s vocals steal the show, making these metal veterans sound like one of the genre’s most promising new acts.

Spirit Adrift — Curse of Conception

There’s a thrilling tension in the music of Spirit Adrift, which pairs classic rock lightness with the heaviest of heavy-metal low ends. On the Arizona outfit’s sophomore album, they flesh out the textures of doom metal to make it feel surprisingly ascendent—less earthbound, more ethereal. The title track pairs heavenly ripples of guitar with a gut-punching melody that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Alice in Chains record. Originally the one-man project of Nate Garrett, Spirit Adrift has now expanded to a quartet, and Curse of Conception is accordingly sprawling: an anthemic, shape-shifting powerhouse to be placed alongside crossover epics like Baroness’ Yellow & Green.

Electric Wizard — “See You in Hell”

Nine albums into their career, the metal lifers in Electric Wizard have little left to prove. Their music, thick with effect pedals and pot smoke, has long been the high-water mark for old-school Sabbath worship in the 21st century. Wizard Bloody Wizard, the follow-up to their great 2014 album Time to Die, features a loving nod to their heroes right in its title. And while the stakes aren’t particularly high on the album’s lurching, menacing opener “See You in Hell,” it still packs a heavy punch. It’s almost intimidating just how naturally this comes to them.